7 ms·

Fandom can't decide if leaked songs are real or AI-generated

75 points by wpietri 3y ago

wpietri 3y ago
This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it than I expected. It's also a great example of how "AI" is such a boon to bad actors because neither the LLMs nor scammers care about the truth.
- gumby 3y ago
  > This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it than I expected These guys have come out of the gate strong. I think they only launched in the last couple of weeks. Remains to be seen if they can sustain it.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  You could argue that in art it is folly to worry about authenticity and the real shame is when a masterful “fake” suddenly loses all its value when you find out it wasn’t painted or recorded by the person you thought it was. Edit: I am torn about how I feel on the matter but here’s a story worth sharing: I stayed up all night the day before the release of a much-awaited book in a series to read, leaked blurry jpeg by leaked blurry jpeg, hundreds of pages of the book that had just appeared online (I also went out and bought a copy the next day). While reading it, I knew there was no guarantee it was “real” and it could have been an elaborate hoax but the quality of the storytelling was such that I didn’t care (at least in the moment) if it was fan fiction or the real deal: it was good and I wouldn’t have regretted my time or enjoyed what I had read any less if it turned out to be a “fake.”
  - wpietri 3y ago
    I could argue that, but it would be wrong. For me, art is about human connection. When I look at a work, I'm interested not just in the surface layer of the image, but what the work evokes in me and what was in the mind and context of its creator. If what I'm getting is just a synthetic, semi-random découpé, then that is lost. Similarly, looking at randomly generated maps can be fun, but it's a pretty shallow fun unless there's a real territory represented there. That said, it can also be interesting to look at the machinery that's generating it, in the same way I enjoy videos of how things get made. But it's a different kind of interest and engages different parts of my mind.
    - mc32 3y ago
      To me it's the basic, "does a a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it make a sound?" Perception vs reality.
      - arcticfox 3y ago
        I don't really get the connection between the scenarios - and trying to think through it I just ran into one more realization of how LLMs have changed things. If I was sure a human wrote this I'd probably put some more effort to see things from that perspective, maybe it's a good way to think about it. But unfortunately now that this type of comment can be the rambling of an LLM, I don't want to put in the effort when it could simply be a mechanical fever dream...
    - jnovek 3y ago
      “For me, art is about human connection.” I find the story of a human who makes an excellent fake pretty fascinating. There are noteworthy examples of forgery-as-art throughout history. I think art, as a concept, is a big enough space to house both things.
      - viciousvoxel 3y ago
        In fact, there's a museum of forgeries in Vienna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Art_Fakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Art_Fakes)
      - wpietri 3y ago
        Sure, I am also very interested in forgers. I'm also interested in the machinery of what's currently getting labeled as AI. But I'm not interested in having one confused for the others.
    - hypeit 3y ago
      > I could argue that, but it would be wrong. You wouldn't be wrong, you would just be post-modern. As a post-modernist viewer, I decide the context that I want to place media in.
  - kevinventullo 3y ago
    I sympathize with this argument to some extent, but also would also warn that it conflicts with how many people consume art, to the point where they will respond almost hostilely.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    For me, the value of art is in the communication between the artist and myself. If I don't care about the artist, the art has little meaning to me. In the case of music, it transforms art into just a sequence of interesting noises.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Yep. A body of work reveals bits and pieces of some real, human perspective and life and mind that evolves and moves through the world between each work, adding even more richness to it. A new work from an artist I like isn’t just exciting because I get more of a thing I like (that gets dull after a while) but because I’m excited about what they want to show me and tell me this time. How’s their work changed? How does it reflect on their prior work? What’s on their mind this, or last, year? Et c. I don’t really care about having some equivalent “conversation” with an LLM.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    So much of art's value is in originality, and what separates originality is first vs rest. There are likely thousands of people who can paint extremely high quality Monet-alikes, but they weren't there at the beginning of the impressionist movement. Granted, there's also name weight and limited supply due to creator death, but that "first!" can't be ignored. The artistic-economic tangle around originality wasn't something I'd thought about deeply until I saw some of Warhol's "X of Y" prints in person. Because he used an inexact process, there are subtle differences from frame to frame, which to me begged the question of whether a specific selection of frames and composition of them together was sufficient to re-establish a unique, original artistic work.
    - ComputerGuru 3y ago
      I have no firm position on the matter but I am nevertheless intrigued by the debate so I’ll posit a question: let’s grant the originality is certainly important. Hypothetically: Hitchcock releases his first masterful suspense film. It rightfully gets and deserves all praise. His compatriot releases a “knock off” and Hitchcock simultaneously releases a second film along the lines of his first. How do you measure originality here in the context of these latter two movies, neither of which was “the first” in its niche?
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        I'd further tighten the scenario a bit before opining, while hopefully staying true to what you're asking. Let's imagine Hitchcock's compatriot releases a film that is Hitchcock-esque in every way it can be (camera, lighting, themes, sound... the whole package), while featuring a novel plot. Then let's say Hitchcock also releases an equally-equivalent film to his first work. There is no non-plot innovation in either work, and the plot is as similar as can be while remaining distinct. What are the values these works could likely command? To me... I think the Hitchcock work would be more valuable, by virtue of his name, which in turn originated its value from his first masterful and original work. His compatriot's film would be valuable. After all, Hitchcock's original work was acclaimed, appreciated, and popular, so it stands to a reason an extremely similar work would be as well. But I can't see it approaching the value of Hitchcock's second, despite them being functionally identical artistic works. It's instead discounted by the lack of Hitchcock's name, itself valuable from the link to his first, original work. Interesting thought exercise! The follow-up would be what would happen if the market were flooded with first-alike films, either from Hitchcock or his compatriot!
  - gumby 3y ago
    A lot of people care about authenticity, but I'm with the crowd that couldn't care less. A book once owned by Issac Newton vs a used paperback with the same text are the same to me. A copy of a famous print vs one of the prints actualy made by the artist (or by someone in her studio!): I wouldn't pay extra for that. Really nice music by someone who likes the same famous musician as I do? Great! I'm not denying the appeal of "authenticity" but I can't for the life of me understand it.
  - esafak 3y ago
    In certain modern arts (esp. the visual ones) the connection between the art and the artist is valuable in itself. The creation is considered primarily in relation to its creator. It is curious why some arts are more susceptible to this thinking than others. I think it is a consequence of maturity; when technique is exhausted, the art seeks development in other avenues.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  I don't think it's really that interesting that LLMs can lie. People have been lying with the written word since the written word existed. Hoaxes and scams are not new. I think what is new is that there are certain signals in text and creative work in general that would ordinarily demonstrate that some care and effort and resources have been used in the process of creating it, which makes it seem more likely that it's legitimate, and that now those signals are no longer valid. I think that people will rather quickly adjust from default credibility to default skepticism for text online, and will rely more on "provenance" for determining what to trust.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    I think that people actually don't lie about some of the things LLMs lie about, which is why it's so jarring that they do. I'm not saying people don't lie - they obviously do. It's that someone's not going to give me documentation about a Unix command line utility that doesn't exist, or a programming library API, and then have be believe them a second time, so when Guido tells me about awk one liners, I believe him. When Ellie the LLM comes around and feeds me lies in a way a person wouldn't, it's really jarring.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Agreed, it's quite a crazy and fascinating article. Had me laughing cynically in a way that doesn't feel good. > no one is really sure what’s real, what’s fake, whether they’re being scammed, or who or what made the songs that they’re listening to. This is close to the definition of technologically induced societal madness Jaron Lanier sketched in an article about a year ago. Pop will eat itself. We always knew that. Pop is the spirit of whimsical, ephemeral, self-devouring, involuted art. It's to be expected. But so much else has become like Pop; news media, food, medicine, clothing, even the cars we drive... At some point AI combined with appalling cyber-security and our over-reliance on tech will start to tear all of these things apart. This kinda started in the pandemic, even before AI. Is it really government advice to drink bleach? Or a terrorist plot? Philip K. Dick would not know how to write this stuff.
myelin 3y ago
My HN workflow is to open a bunch of tabs, then close the main page, and read through all the articles. When I got to this tab, I saw "404", figured I'd hit a bad link, and closed the tab... then realized that that was the name of the publication.
- rob74 3y ago
  Yup, the white popup that was shown when I opened the page made it look even more like an error message...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mmaunder 3y ago
  Yeah it’s not a great brand choice.
  - mecsred 3y ago
    Maybe it's actually a genius brand choice. Most people wouldn't remember http error codes even if they've seen 404 pages before. Only scrambles the nerds.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I do that, but I've pinned the main page tab so that all the new tabs open to the right of that one. Once I've read/closed them all, I just hit reload and keep the addiction going. =)
rob74 3y ago
[flagged]
hypeit 3y ago
This seems like the most interesting thing to happen to pop music in quite some time. It's been about hoovering up as much cash as possible from teenagers for the past 70 years so putting label created bubblegum in a steelcage deathmatch with ai generated music actually gives the genre a perspective with a bit more depth.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- shawnc 3y ago
  Great point. It's fascinating that the trend of the pop music industry has been towards more and more electronic control over vocals and instruments and everything else for a very long time... and now that AI can basically replicate it, and with all the auto-tune that we got used to, we can barely tell if it's 'real' or AI-generated.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    It's almost like the capital/distribution forces of mass market media have been striving to devalue the human components of the art... ... but I can't imagine why that'd be attractive to them.
  - greatwave1 3y ago
    I don't think this is accurate -- overt autotune in pop music peaked in the 00's, and has really not been as influential in the pop trends of the last decade or two. Many of the most popular artists today lean away from heavy electronic control, and go for a more acoustic/natural sound. I think that the AI vocals becoming indistinguishable from the real thing has more to do with the quality of the AI, and less to do with modern pop music sounding robotic.
    - porkbeer 3y ago
      Name a singpe pop tune without pitch correction in the last 20 years. A few exist, but go look. It will be enlightening, and perhaps disheartening.
lsy 3y ago
The behavior of the sellers described in the article makes me think it's all but certain the songs are AI-generated. Imagine telling a jeweler a diamond looks fake, and they first pull out their handy diamond faking machine to show you how bad a fake diamond looks in comparison to what they're selling, then curse at you and close the store.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  I like this analogy. To all intents and purposes, that's a diamond. To all intents and purposes, this is pop music.
- TheHappyOddish 3y ago
  You can just tell looking at the article. $400 is a scam number for sure - too low for actual leaks (I assume news orgs etc would pay thousands), but enough that the grifter can walk away cashed up. It's got that scammy smell about it.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
RajT88 3y ago
This got me mulling over what would happen if AI became better at writing pop songs than humans. So let's game it out... Most of the pop hits of the last 30 years come from a small handful of songsmiths. Most pop stars already don't really write their own songs, they are more the 'Figurehead' of the whole experience. Their overall look and stage presence are the major selling point (some of them can't really sing without autotune, looking at you Britney). So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. Mayyybe a few artists will sign away their likeness and voice to churn out album after album, hoping the public is none-the-wiser. Pop music may become still more homogenous, since part of the huge pop hits is the unexpected twist worked in that makes it "pop". It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't change that much. I think the appetite for a completely synthetic pop star is not there in the West - they'll have to be tricked into it. Pop stars are already arguably artificial in some form.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  > So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. It would be more than that, though, if AI truly becomes as good at writing pop songs as that handful of songsmiths. Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. As you said, there aren't many, and they can only write so many songs per year. Because of this, choosing which pop stars get to sing the songs they write is a big factor in determining who becomes successful. If suddenly AI can pump out as many pop hits as we like, that limiting factor goes away and the whole market changes.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    >Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. Anything to support that conjecture? Pop songs take off because they're marketed properly AFAICT. Writers choose from many songs, all good, producers largely decide which songs and groups will make it. Songs can be around for years before being given to a star to make into a hit. Of course marketing now can be 'going viral', and that can be various degrees of organic and paid promotion.
    - 3y ago
minimaxir 3y ago
Voice cloning is a surprisingly underdicussed area of generative AI. It's also much more thorny: while text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere and tend to be more obvious, voice cloning intentionally blurs the lines, which also professionally and impacts the source of the voice being cloned: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-atkin-assassins-creed https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... Last month, there was an incident where a prominent voice actor had their voice cloned for an AI parody video and the actor asked them to take it down; in response, the voice actor was harrassed off of social media for a bit.
- morelisp 3y ago
  > text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere I don't think these are as distinct as you think. Especially image-generating AI uses seem driven by the same impulse as voice cloning, virtually always "I want a picture like this picture I already have of X, but drawn like artist Y" (or "I want a picture of X for purely prurient reasons"), very rarely is it people struggling to put their own ideas into the world.
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    That was a stereotype from a year ago when Midjourney was first released, and hasn't been accurate for a very very long time particularly as new creative approaches have developed.
    - morelisp 3y ago
      > Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco, creator of AI text generation tools Ah, I get it, AI tools which earn you money good and creative, AI tools which don't bad.
      - minimaxir 3y ago
        Or, alternatively, I am one of the few people who understands the many nuances in the generative AI space from experience.
mmaunder 3y ago
This is what nascent disruption looks and feels like. Screenwriters at the WGA stopping work to “prevent” AI taking their jobs or part of their jobs. AI music infringing on brands. You will see many Napster’s and Kazaa’s emerge and die, and ultimately lawsuits and regulation will evolve and stabilize the landscape. But fighting to go back to the way things have been is like trying to stop people from using electricity and creating power plants and appliances: With a fundamental breakthrough of this magnitude, things will change and you will see a surge in innovation, with many old world casualties.
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  The writers strike has little to do with "AI" and a lot to do with getting paid for shows on streaming services. Tech media has ran wild with the AI angle because it's attention-grabbing, but it's far from being the most important demand.
  - 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
    That, and writing teams getting hired for entire productions/seasons vs. treating each script and rewrite like one-off gig work.
  - Akronymus 3y ago
    Also, I really doubt the streaming companies and such are even as profitable as they say. Plenty of book cooking.
  - throwaway29812 3y ago
    It was also primed to take on the next big thing at the same time. Fighting this hard over streaming rights and ignoring AI makes no sense.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  Accepting the wholesale decimation of the entertainment system by indirect copyright infringement is a pretty big issue.
solardev 3y ago
Few years from now, we'll all be all out of work, the earth will be burnt to a crisp, there'll be like 10 rich people and everyone else will be walking the deserts looking for the tiniest shred of green. But man, the soundtrack will be ROCKING!
londons_explore 3y ago
When real songs and AI songs can't be told apart even by groups of fans working together, the artists should be scared. If AI can be so convincing, then your publisher won't we wanting to pay you to make any new songs if they can just pay an AI guy for a few days to crank out a new song.
- rnk 3y ago
  Artists are scared. We saw autotune caused some controversy. What happens when an artist releases ai voice songs themselves? What about an artist who loses her voice and then releases ai voice songs, is it real then? I think a person or artist should own their voice, but what is the threshold for an altered ones that is different? And for 'real' human voices someone can sing and sound just like you, that's not a crime. Would it be the same for an ai-generated voice, anyone can copy any of them? With the troubling to me decision that you can't copyright ai generated images, it feels natural to me that you could probably not copyright / control ai generated voices the same way. This is a mess, then I could take my ai generated video and voices of presidential candidates, politicians and they can't stop me maybe, because it's all got that magic adjective "ai" in front of it.
  - bloat 3y ago
    We know what happens when a pop group doesn't perform on their own records. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
    - rnk 3y ago
      It was bad then, today it would probably be different. At least after one big artist breaks that barrier, then people won't care much.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- interestica 3y ago
  We are so close to having previous albums being 'covered' by other artists. And we will have the option in real-time in streaming apps. Eg, listen to Nirvana's Nevermind as if performed by the Beatles. Record companies can make money off of it -- so they will support this in some way. And they will fight to make sure people can't easily do it on their own systems (which is the way it's going right now).
_sys49152 3y ago
i mean, the vocals sound like they belong. the entire song sounds ai generated - bland, vacuous. sounds exactly like when i turn on the car radio in 2007. might as well just say fuck it, put out a full album of ai tracks. go wwe, its fake wrestling who cares. we're about 3 years away from ai making 5 star sounding tracks with vocals and lyrics.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Aside: I'm not sure a banner saying 404 is the best idea. I opened the page and very nearly reflexively closed it thinking the site was down. Close the banner saying "404"and the content was then visible ... sigh.
- twic 3y ago
  Given that it's a new venture continuing their work together at an old one, I thought 100 would be a more appropriate name, but that's pretty obscure even for an HTTP status.
- TheHappyOddish 3y ago
  I reflexively hit my back button _twice_ after seeing a page littered with 404s.
- infoseek12 3y ago
  Until I saw your comment I thought the article was broken I open the page for a split second, saw the 404, and hit the back button then started skimming the comments
iainctduncan 3y ago
If they are selling them (I.e. a scam) it's likely a combination of ML and good old fashioned sound alike production. There have been people who are very, very good at sound-alikes for ages and ML is just going to make that easier. This is also somewhat of a commentary on just how banal and formulaic radio pop has gotten. Sigh.
lubujackson 3y ago
For context on the state of AI music, there are plenty of AI tracks out there now with random glitches. But to see what is possible, this is an AI-aided mashup just released a day or two ago by a well know remixer: https://youtu.be/uo7nAfUZoIM https://youtu.be/uo7nAfUZoIM Smooth and identifiable already (plus the deepfake video which is just crazy). Everyone can wring their hands about copyright and authenticity and royalties, but I am excited by the opportunity for creators to use AI to create new things. Eventually, humans will get better at sniffing out fakes and get bored with simple emulation of vocal tics.
- throwaway29812 3y ago
  The tech is really impressive, but the video you liked to is awful.

75 points by wpietri 3y ago

This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it than I expected. It's also a great example of how "AI" is such a boon to bad actors because neither the LLMs nor scammers care about the truth.

gumby 3y ago
> This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it than I expected These guys have come out of the gate strong. I think they only launched in the last couple of weeks. Remains to be seen if they can sustain it.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
You could argue that in art it is folly to worry about authenticity and the real shame is when a masterful “fake” suddenly loses all its value when you find out it wasn’t painted or recorded by the person you thought it was. Edit: I am torn about how I feel on the matter but here’s a story worth sharing: I stayed up all night the day before the release of a much-awaited book in a series to read, leaked blurry jpeg by leaked blurry jpeg, hundreds of pages of the book that had just appeared online (I also went out and bought a copy the next day). While reading it, I knew there was no guarantee it was “real” and it could have been an elaborate hoax but the quality of the storytelling was such that I didn’t care (at least in the moment) if it was fan fiction or the real deal: it was good and I wouldn’t have regretted my time or enjoyed what I had read any less if it turned out to be a “fake.”
- wpietri 3y ago
  I could argue that, but it would be wrong. For me, art is about human connection. When I look at a work, I'm interested not just in the surface layer of the image, but what the work evokes in me and what was in the mind and context of its creator. If what I'm getting is just a synthetic, semi-random découpé, then that is lost. Similarly, looking at randomly generated maps can be fun, but it's a pretty shallow fun unless there's a real territory represented there. That said, it can also be interesting to look at the machinery that's generating it, in the same way I enjoy videos of how things get made. But it's a different kind of interest and engages different parts of my mind.
  - mc32 3y ago
    To me it's the basic, "does a a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it make a sound?" Perception vs reality.
    - arcticfox 3y ago
      I don't really get the connection between the scenarios - and trying to think through it I just ran into one more realization of how LLMs have changed things. If I was sure a human wrote this I'd probably put some more effort to see things from that perspective, maybe it's a good way to think about it. But unfortunately now that this type of comment can be the rambling of an LLM, I don't want to put in the effort when it could simply be a mechanical fever dream...
  - jnovek 3y ago
    “For me, art is about human connection.” I find the story of a human who makes an excellent fake pretty fascinating. There are noteworthy examples of forgery-as-art throughout history. I think art, as a concept, is a big enough space to house both things.
    - viciousvoxel 3y ago
      In fact, there's a museum of forgeries in Vienna (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Art_Fakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Art_Fakes)
    - wpietri 3y ago
      Sure, I am also very interested in forgers. I'm also interested in the machinery of what's currently getting labeled as AI. But I'm not interested in having one confused for the others.
  - hypeit 3y ago
    > I could argue that, but it would be wrong. You wouldn't be wrong, you would just be post-modern. As a post-modernist viewer, I decide the context that I want to place media in.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  I sympathize with this argument to some extent, but also would also warn that it conflicts with how many people consume art, to the point where they will respond almost hostilely.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  For me, the value of art is in the communication between the artist and myself. If I don't care about the artist, the art has little meaning to me. In the case of music, it transforms art into just a sequence of interesting noises.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Yep. A body of work reveals bits and pieces of some real, human perspective and life and mind that evolves and moves through the world between each work, adding even more richness to it. A new work from an artist I like isn’t just exciting because I get more of a thing I like (that gets dull after a while) but because I’m excited about what they want to show me and tell me this time. How’s their work changed? How does it reflect on their prior work? What’s on their mind this, or last, year? Et c. I don’t really care about having some equivalent “conversation” with an LLM.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  So much of art's value is in originality, and what separates originality is first vs rest. There are likely thousands of people who can paint extremely high quality Monet-alikes, but they weren't there at the beginning of the impressionist movement. Granted, there's also name weight and limited supply due to creator death, but that "first!" can't be ignored. The artistic-economic tangle around originality wasn't something I'd thought about deeply until I saw some of Warhol's "X of Y" prints in person. Because he used an inexact process, there are subtle differences from frame to frame, which to me begged the question of whether a specific selection of frames and composition of them together was sufficient to re-establish a unique, original artistic work.
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    I have no firm position on the matter but I am nevertheless intrigued by the debate so I’ll posit a question: let’s grant the originality is certainly important. Hypothetically: Hitchcock releases his first masterful suspense film. It rightfully gets and deserves all praise. His compatriot releases a “knock off” and Hitchcock simultaneously releases a second film along the lines of his first. How do you measure originality here in the context of these latter two movies, neither of which was “the first” in its niche?
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      I'd further tighten the scenario a bit before opining, while hopefully staying true to what you're asking. Let's imagine Hitchcock's compatriot releases a film that is Hitchcock-esque in every way it can be (camera, lighting, themes, sound... the whole package), while featuring a novel plot. Then let's say Hitchcock also releases an equally-equivalent film to his first work. There is no non-plot innovation in either work, and the plot is as similar as can be while remaining distinct. What are the values these works could likely command? To me... I think the Hitchcock work would be more valuable, by virtue of his name, which in turn originated its value from his first masterful and original work. His compatriot's film would be valuable. After all, Hitchcock's original work was acclaimed, appreciated, and popular, so it stands to a reason an extremely similar work would be as well. But I can't see it approaching the value of Hitchcock's second, despite them being functionally identical artistic works. It's instead discounted by the lack of Hitchcock's name, itself valuable from the link to his first, original work. Interesting thought exercise! The follow-up would be what would happen if the market were flooded with first-alike films, either from Hitchcock or his compatriot!
- gumby 3y ago
  A lot of people care about authenticity, but I'm with the crowd that couldn't care less. A book once owned by Issac Newton vs a used paperback with the same text are the same to me. A copy of a famous print vs one of the prints actualy made by the artist (or by someone in her studio!): I wouldn't pay extra for that. Really nice music by someone who likes the same famous musician as I do? Great! I'm not denying the appeal of "authenticity" but I can't for the life of me understand it.
- esafak 3y ago
  In certain modern arts (esp. the visual ones) the connection between the art and the artist is valuable in itself. The creation is considered primarily in relation to its creator. It is curious why some arts are more susceptible to this thinking than others. I think it is a consequence of maturity; when technique is exhausted, the art seeks development in other avenues.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
empath-nirvana 3y ago
I don't think it's really that interesting that LLMs can lie. People have been lying with the written word since the written word existed. Hoaxes and scams are not new. I think what is new is that there are certain signals in text and creative work in general that would ordinarily demonstrate that some care and effort and resources have been used in the process of creating it, which makes it seem more likely that it's legitimate, and that now those signals are no longer valid. I think that people will rather quickly adjust from default credibility to default skepticism for text online, and will rely more on "provenance" for determining what to trust.
- fragmede 3y ago
  I think that people actually don't lie about some of the things LLMs lie about, which is why it's so jarring that they do. I'm not saying people don't lie - they obviously do. It's that someone's not going to give me documentation about a Unix command line utility that doesn't exist, or a programming library API, and then have be believe them a second time, so when Guido tells me about awk one liners, I believe him. When Ellie the LLM comes around and feeds me lies in a way a person wouldn't, it's really jarring.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Agreed, it's quite a crazy and fascinating article. Had me laughing cynically in a way that doesn't feel good. > no one is really sure what’s real, what’s fake, whether they’re being scammed, or who or what made the songs that they’re listening to. This is close to the definition of technologically induced societal madness Jaron Lanier sketched in an article about a year ago. Pop will eat itself. We always knew that. Pop is the spirit of whimsical, ephemeral, self-devouring, involuted art. It's to be expected. But so much else has become like Pop; news media, food, medicine, clothing, even the cars we drive... At some point AI combined with appalling cyber-security and our over-reliance on tech will start to tear all of these things apart. This kinda started in the pandemic, even before AI. Is it really government advice to drink bleach? Or a terrorist plot? Philip K. Dick would not know how to write this stuff.

myelin 3y ago

My HN workflow is to open a bunch of tabs, then close the main page, and read through all the articles. When I got to this tab, I saw "404", figured I'd hit a bad link, and closed the tab... then realized that that was the name of the publication.

rob74 3y ago
Yup, the white popup that was shown when I opened the page made it look even more like an error message...
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mmaunder 3y ago
Yeah it’s not a great brand choice.
- mecsred 3y ago
  Maybe it's actually a genius brand choice. Most people wouldn't remember http error codes even if they've seen 404 pages before. Only scrambles the nerds.
latchkey 3y ago
I do that, but I've pinned the main page tab so that all the new tabs open to the right of that one. Once I've read/closed them all, I just hit reload and keep the addiction going. =)

rob74 3y ago

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hypeit 3y ago

This seems like the most interesting thing to happen to pop music in quite some time. It's been about hoovering up as much cash as possible from teenagers for the past 70 years so putting label created bubblegum in a steelcage deathmatch with ai generated music actually gives the genre a perspective with a bit more depth.

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shawnc 3y ago
Great point. It's fascinating that the trend of the pop music industry has been towards more and more electronic control over vocals and instruments and everything else for a very long time... and now that AI can basically replicate it, and with all the auto-tune that we got used to, we can barely tell if it's 'real' or AI-generated.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  It's almost like the capital/distribution forces of mass market media have been striving to devalue the human components of the art... ... but I can't imagine why that'd be attractive to them.
- greatwave1 3y ago
  I don't think this is accurate -- overt autotune in pop music peaked in the 00's, and has really not been as influential in the pop trends of the last decade or two. Many of the most popular artists today lean away from heavy electronic control, and go for a more acoustic/natural sound. I think that the AI vocals becoming indistinguishable from the real thing has more to do with the quality of the AI, and less to do with modern pop music sounding robotic.
  - porkbeer 3y ago
    Name a singpe pop tune without pitch correction in the last 20 years. A few exist, but go look. It will be enlightening, and perhaps disheartening.

lsy 3y ago

The behavior of the sellers described in the article makes me think it's all but certain the songs are AI-generated. Imagine telling a jeweler a diamond looks fake, and they first pull out their handy diamond faking machine to show you how bad a fake diamond looks in comparison to what they're selling, then curse at you and close the store.

Tao3300 3y ago
I like this analogy. To all intents and purposes, that's a diamond. To all intents and purposes, this is pop music.
TheHappyOddish 3y ago
You can just tell looking at the article. $400 is a scam number for sure - too low for actual leaks (I assume news orgs etc would pay thousands), but enough that the grifter can walk away cashed up. It's got that scammy smell about it.

varelse 3y ago

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RajT88 3y ago

This got me mulling over what would happen if AI became better at writing pop songs than humans. So let's game it out... Most of the pop hits of the last 30 years come from a small handful of songsmiths. Most pop stars already don't really write their own songs, they are more the 'Figurehead' of the whole experience. Their overall look and stage presence are the major selling point (some of them can't really sing without autotune, looking at you Britney). So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. Mayyybe a few artists will sign away their likeness and voice to churn out album after album, hoping the public is none-the-wiser. Pop music may become still more homogenous, since part of the huge pop hits is the unexpected twist worked in that makes it "pop". It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't change that much. I think the appetite for a completely synthetic pop star is not there in the West - they'll have to be tricked into it. Pop stars are already arguably artificial in some form.

cortesoft 3y ago
> So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. It would be more than that, though, if AI truly becomes as good at writing pop songs as that handful of songsmiths. Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. As you said, there aren't many, and they can only write so many songs per year. Because of this, choosing which pop stars get to sing the songs they write is a big factor in determining who becomes successful. If suddenly AI can pump out as many pop hits as we like, that limiting factor goes away and the whole market changes.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. Anything to support that conjecture? Pop songs take off because they're marketed properly AFAICT. Writers choose from many songs, all good, producers largely decide which songs and groups will make it. Songs can be around for years before being given to a star to make into a hit. Of course marketing now can be 'going viral', and that can be various degrees of organic and paid promotion.
  - 3y ago

minimaxir 3y ago

Voice cloning is a surprisingly underdicussed area of generative AI. It's also much more thorny: while text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere and tend to be more obvious, voice cloning intentionally blurs the lines, which also professionally and impacts the source of the voice being cloned: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-atkin-assassins-creed https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... Last month, there was an incident where a prominent voice actor had their voice cloned for an AI parody video and the actor asked them to take it down; in response, the voice actor was harrassed off of social media for a bit.

morelisp 3y ago
> text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere I don't think these are as distinct as you think. Especially image-generating AI uses seem driven by the same impulse as voice cloning, virtually always "I want a picture like this picture I already have of X, but drawn like artist Y" (or "I want a picture of X for purely prurient reasons"), very rarely is it people struggling to put their own ideas into the world.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  That was a stereotype from a year ago when Midjourney was first released, and hasn't been accurate for a very very long time particularly as new creative approaches have developed.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    > Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco, creator of AI text generation tools Ah, I get it, AI tools which earn you money good and creative, AI tools which don't bad.
    - minimaxir 3y ago
      Or, alternatively, I am one of the few people who understands the many nuances in the generative AI space from experience.

mmaunder 3y ago

This is what nascent disruption looks and feels like. Screenwriters at the WGA stopping work to “prevent” AI taking their jobs or part of their jobs. AI music infringing on brands. You will see many Napster’s and Kazaa’s emerge and die, and ultimately lawsuits and regulation will evolve and stabilize the landscape. But fighting to go back to the way things have been is like trying to stop people from using electricity and creating power plants and appliances: With a fundamental breakthrough of this magnitude, things will change and you will see a surge in innovation, with many old world casualties.

TremendousJudge 3y ago
The writers strike has little to do with "AI" and a lot to do with getting paid for shows on streaming services. Tech media has ran wild with the AI angle because it's attention-grabbing, but it's far from being the most important demand.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  That, and writing teams getting hired for entire productions/seasons vs. treating each script and rewrite like one-off gig work.
- Akronymus 3y ago
  Also, I really doubt the streaming companies and such are even as profitable as they say. Plenty of book cooking.
- throwaway29812 3y ago
  It was also primed to take on the next big thing at the same time. Fighting this hard over streaming rights and ignoring AI makes no sense.
cyanydeez 3y ago
Accepting the wholesale decimation of the entertainment system by indirect copyright infringement is a pretty big issue.

solardev 3y ago

Few years from now, we'll all be all out of work, the earth will be burnt to a crisp, there'll be like 10 rich people and everyone else will be walking the deserts looking for the tiniest shred of green. But man, the soundtrack will be ROCKING!

londons_explore 3y ago

When real songs and AI songs can't be told apart even by groups of fans working together, the artists should be scared. If AI can be so convincing, then your publisher won't we wanting to pay you to make any new songs if they can just pay an AI guy for a few days to crank out a new song.

rnk 3y ago
Artists are scared. We saw autotune caused some controversy. What happens when an artist releases ai voice songs themselves? What about an artist who loses her voice and then releases ai voice songs, is it real then? I think a person or artist should own their voice, but what is the threshold for an altered ones that is different? And for 'real' human voices someone can sing and sound just like you, that's not a crime. Would it be the same for an ai-generated voice, anyone can copy any of them? With the troubling to me decision that you can't copyright ai generated images, it feels natural to me that you could probably not copyright / control ai generated voices the same way. This is a mess, then I could take my ai generated video and voices of presidential candidates, politicians and they can't stop me maybe, because it's all got that magic adjective "ai" in front of it.
- bloat 3y ago
  We know what happens when a pop group doesn't perform on their own records. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
  - rnk 3y ago
    It was bad then, today it would probably be different. At least after one big artist breaks that barrier, then people won't care much.
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interestica 3y ago
We are so close to having previous albums being 'covered' by other artists. And we will have the option in real-time in streaming apps. Eg, listen to Nirvana's Nevermind as if performed by the Beatles. Record companies can make money off of it -- so they will support this in some way. And they will fight to make sure people can't easily do it on their own systems (which is the way it's going right now).

_sys49152 3y ago

i mean, the vocals sound like they belong. the entire song sounds ai generated - bland, vacuous. sounds exactly like when i turn on the car radio in 2007. might as well just say fuck it, put out a full album of ai tracks. go wwe, its fake wrestling who cares. we're about 3 years away from ai making 5 star sounding tracks with vocals and lyrics.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago

Aside: I'm not sure a banner saying 404 is the best idea. I opened the page and very nearly reflexively closed it thinking the site was down. Close the banner saying "404"and the content was then visible ... sigh.

twic 3y ago
Given that it's a new venture continuing their work together at an old one, I thought 100 would be a more appropriate name, but that's pretty obscure even for an HTTP status.
TheHappyOddish 3y ago
I reflexively hit my back button _twice_ after seeing a page littered with 404s.
infoseek12 3y ago
Until I saw your comment I thought the article was broken I open the page for a split second, saw the 404, and hit the back button then started skimming the comments

iainctduncan 3y ago

If they are selling them (I.e. a scam) it's likely a combination of ML and good old fashioned sound alike production. There have been people who are very, very good at sound-alikes for ages and ML is just going to make that easier. This is also somewhat of a commentary on just how banal and formulaic radio pop has gotten. Sigh.

lubujackson 3y ago

For context on the state of AI music, there are plenty of AI tracks out there now with random glitches. But to see what is possible, this is an AI-aided mashup just released a day or two ago by a well know remixer: https://youtu.be/uo7nAfUZoIM https://youtu.be/uo7nAfUZoIM Smooth and identifiable already (plus the deepfake video which is just crazy). Everyone can wring their hands about copyright and authenticity and royalties, but I am excited by the opportunity for creators to use AI to create new things. Eventually, humans will get better at sniffing out fakes and get bored with simple emulation of vocal tics.

throwaway29812 3y ago
The tech is really impressive, but the video you liked to is awful.